The first overture came in the form of T-shirts. Right after the McClatchy newspaper chain’s $4.5 billion acquisition of Knight Ridder was inked in June, the new management distributed the shirts to everyone who would become part of the new McClatchy Washington bureau. They feature a skull and pen-and-pencil in place of the crossbones, and a slogan that takes off on the rebellious Harley Davidson motto:

“Write Hard, Die Free.”

“I loved the message,” said Ron Hutcheson, Knight Ridder’s longtime White House correspondent. “It was a little, symbolic thing, but it meant that these guys are a good cultural fit.”

After years of retrenching in Washington bureaus, the tale of the two venerable news bureaus joining forces has been a bright spot in local journalism circles. McClatchy is doing everything it can to show former Knight Ridder readers that it values Washington coverage, and to show former Knight Ridder staff that the kind of scoop-driven journalism they’ve always been known for will be valued by the new ownership.

But the new, enlarged bureau will need a bit of that rebel-biker attitude, too, if it is to reverse the trend among regional newspapers that are cutting back on Washington coverage in the face of declining readership back home.

On July 10, the 11 McClatchy Washington bureau reporters, their assorted editors and head honcho David Westphal moved a few blocks from the National Press Building to take possession of Knight Ridder’s newer digs in downtown Washington. In an interview, Westphal expressed the hope that the new, 60-person bureau — which also will edit the work of nine foreign correspondents — will combine the aggressive national reporting of the Knight Ridder bureau with the focus on regional reporting that has been the McClatchy chain’s hallmark.

“Readers want to see the connections between the big national action and their hometown interest, whether about their member of Congress or a connection to a business back home,” said Westphal, who had been McClatchy’s bureau chief since 1998, having spent 17 years at the Des Moines Register. His new title is Washington Editor.

Many have wondered whether the focus on regional coverage would swamp the national focus or vice versa. “I don’t think it has to be an either-or situation,” said Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab at the University of Maryland, which is dedicated to helping news organizations reinvent themselves. “The Knight Ridder bureau broke an incredible amount of enterprise journalism. A lot of Washington bureau journalists . . . are in my view turning into stenographers instead of probing what’s true or not.”

At the same time, some coverage from the capital is too much inside baseball for the readers back home. Those readers often want to have Washington “unpacked” for them — to read stories that spell out how a federal development is relevant to their city, state or regional industries.

Some of McClatchy’s 32 newspapers are giving the beefed-up Washington coverage a big spread. Anders Gyllenhaal, editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, announced that his paper is launching a weekly feature devoted to stories from the Washington bureau. “The Star Tribune will always place its emphasis on local and regional news. But the stronger national and foreign reporting adds a depth we hope readers will appreciate with so many meaningful stories developing across the globe,” he wrote in a column to readers.

Westphal has announced some changes in the new, combined bureau. He wants every McClatchy paper to have a correspondent representing it in Washington. He is looking to hire a reporter for the Macon Telegraph and the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer — Georgia papers whose Washington presence was cut by Knight Ridder. And he’s instituted more sharing arrangements between regionally clustered papers. Maria Recio, a longtime correspondent for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, now also covers Washington for The Sun Herald in Gulfport, Miss. “I get to cover all the post-Hurricane Katrina stuff,” she said. “I had my first page-one story” last week.

The new McClatchy bureau now has 17 regional reporters and 17 national reporters — a symbolically important equal split. The Web site of the old Knight Ridder bureau used to feature biographies of only its national and foreign correspondents; now the McClatchy bureau Web site offers bios of regional reporters as well.

The reality is that McClatchy is not immune from the trends that have undermined news organizations nationwide: declining readership and the loss of advertising to the Web. Its papers still need to make the dollars-and-cents part work. But Westphal said he believes the McClatchy and Knight Ridder staffs in Washington both come from a tradition of fighting against some of the bigger newspapers, whose reporters often get spoon-fed the scoops. “There’s a bit of an underdog element in each,” he said.

Let’s hope that the contrariness expressed on those T-shirts bucks the trend we’re seeing in other Washington bureaus. Write hard!

Contributing editor Elizabeth Wasserman is a Washington freelance writer. She can be reached at ewasserman@cq.com.